Dimly Resting Frost
by Purple Lex
Summary: AU from 'An Invisible Thread', sequel to 'Brightly Dead Leaves'. They're both broken but when you put two immortals together, they can't stay that way forever - especially when neither sees walking away from the other as a desirable option, no matter the pain they're reminded of. Sylaire bonding; slight romantic undertones.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** I am posting this in chapters because one, it is long, and two, certain breaks are natural, which I think will help when reading it. But I'm still viewing it as a one-shot! Even though it's around 12k words. (I need a program that has some kind of built-in buzzer for word count because this is getting ridiculous….) Sequel to 'Brightly Dead Leaves'

Depending on how well I plan/how much I write (I have a bad habit of taking on several projects and finishing them months later, as you can see), this will either be 2/2 or 2/4 parts in the Seasons series I planned. I feel like this one made it kind of full circle but feedback please? The other two would be more _*semi not really spoiler warning* _plotsy.

**Warning** for an instance of suicide (in a later chapter, I will warn then) and generally depressive mindset.

And with that out of the way I wanted to stay ultra mega thanks to everyone reading this :3 as well as everyone that liked/reblogged the promo I did over on tumblr ages ago. You guys are the best!

**Disclaimer: The only thing I own related to Heroes are the box set DVDs. If I had creative control, I would bankrupt myself to have it run on air long enough for Sylaire to become canon. I'm not even kidding. Plus some other things would happen like Pemma and Micah and his family would come back and maybe some more Noah flashbacks and we would have a semi relevant plot that would show how Peter or Hiro at least saved Caitlin but putting her in another time…. *cough* **

* * *

The first thing he comprehends in the early dawn hours as the sunlight filters through the living room unevenly is that he cannot feel his skin.

They have remained here for a month now and despite the time lapse that is utterly boring in its repetitiveness, he cannot say that much has changed. She gave him the couch (the length of which is a good foot short of what he needs to lay down _properly_), half of the blankets she used, a politely _glare-full_ disposition, and a very small amount of functioning trust.

Perhaps that could be counted as _change_. After all, now she was simply glaring at him with a mum mouth instead of hurling insults passionately. She was also not accusing him of wrong-doing every time he wandered from her side to do his own thing... Which was often. However, despite what she likely thought, he never roamed far enough to lose her; she was always in his peripheral, a sort of touchstone in this barren landscape — and maybe world, too.

The unspoken arrangement was clear: survival roommates without the warm friendship, needed company without the social sparring.

His skin awakened with a slow thrum as he clumsily rubbed his numb arms together. Sylar knew she was not awake yet because if she was she would be pestering him to stand up already. They had plans today. He yawned and sat up anyway.

Then, with a burst of sensation, his skin felt like it was being pricked by a thousand needles and the muscles running along bone, from elbow to fingertip, began to spasm and move without much rhyme or reason through a need to shake off the imbalance of nerves. It reignited the calculating control he once held. This was the fourth night in a row that the numbness had occurred, the ninth in total if he was counting properly.

Sylar was. He couldn't mistake it if he wished to. Such things were ingrained in him as much as the act of breathing.

Tossing the blankets off to pool in a corner of the worn couch, he then moved to the things he kept on the shelves of the open cabinet at the edge of the room. Boots, second shirt layer, and jacket donned, he slipped out the back door (the only one they used).

The air was drawn in slowly over his teeth and tongue, through his throat, pooling in his lungs. It was an act of precaution against the crystals hanging heavy and sharp in the air. His eyes widened, all lethargy knocked away. Throughout the entirety of the past month he had managed to sleep in three hour intervals, a wonderfully miraculous feat. When he had been by himself, he had hardly slept at all.

He wasn't adverse to admitting his being fearful of the government, of the hunting, of the _people_. And wasn't that a turn around? Sylar afraid of the lowly citizen working a nine to five job at a convenience store? Or fast food joint? Or even commuting in their car? But any one of them could report him — many did — and he had to keep that line, that very blurry and messy and more on the side of gray than black and white line that he had established after the tumbling slide of chaos that had become his life finally touched his conscious, a young innocent mistaken for an attacker.

All of which boiled down to one principle: _he couldn't kill them._

All those that were aware were only brainwashed innocents that, in his case, were doing the justified thing in turning him in. Sylar wasn't blind to the fact that he had done horrible things. He just didn't want to be locked away like a lab rat, fed a diet of sedatives through IV with the occasional bout of consciousness if a nurse got too preoccupied in the hallway between his room and the next.

Selfish, yes. Did he care about that? No. He didn't have the luxury.

The landscape was frosted lightly, the first true sign of winter. It was only October. However, they were in a forest, in the mountains, in a northern state of America. Sylar wasn't all that surprised at the quick change of seasons.

His attention was distracted slightly when the back door creaked on its hinges and Claire emerged next to him, pulling her own coat on. She cursed at the temperature she was met with and zipped up the hoodie worn underneath. Even if the cabin wasn't anything special to look at, it was still a solid structure, providing its own meager amount of insulation from the outside.

She exhaled a long breath, casting her gaze about as clinically as he did. There was nothing to look at, though; the metaphorical coast was clear, devoid of people and animals alike. All was right in their corner of the world. For now.

"Ready?" She asked curtly. He nodded. She moved back inside.

Sylar followed her, catching the duffel bag that was thrown his way. He packed up the few clothes he possessed and a few of the things he knew about that had been left behind from the previous owner, including a busted hand-dial radio that he had fixed in under a day. It wasn't his normal area of expertise but he was a quick study. He didn't grab the blankets or anything else of that nature, things they would need if they were leaving for good; they would be back.

He walked to where the kitchen counter separated the two spaces in the main room, perching his frame against the protruding wood. It provided him the best view into the bedroom Claire was at the moment shuffling around in. She cracked her door because of him but it was never closed; in case anything happened, she told him, and he then told himself.

Not even he could believe that. She had let him stay. _Him_ — the boogeyman, the stalker, the serial killer, the monster, the attacker of her mother and father, killer of her friend, her (resurrected) uncle, biological mother and father, and countless others whose eyes she had never landed on, though some she had, like Elle, who he knew had come to Primatech with the cheerleading blonde so many years before.

_Elle Bishop._ Wasn't that a lost name? It had been a long time since he had thought about her, in any case. All this time later and he still couldn't explain anything about what had happened in that situation other than she had given him hope at their touch one day and then flinched at it the next. Everything after that was a haze of inner turmoil he was too pathetic to control.

Claire opened the door fully then and he shook off the thoughts as he caught her bright green eyes. She promptly narrowed them at him, a silently still second flowing between them as she assessed his stare and him hers. Those eyes of hers would always be bright, he mused flippantly, no matter the kind of pain that laid behind them.

It was almost admirable.

She strode into the hallway and then past him, pushing outside. He watched the door get two inches away from closing completely and then he followed after her leisurely with his long legs. She stopped at the dock and cast an unreadable gaze back.

It was toward the cabin, not him. That he told himself too and that he actually managed to believe. She held no sentimentality towards him.

* * *

The closest town was 41 miles away, the forest lightening in its density considerably once they were two miles out from it. It was during days like this that Sylar couldn't manage any regret in taking Claire's ability. Maybe he was innately selfish by nature, maybe he would never feel regret the way a normal person would. All he knew was that he was able to keep walking at a brisk pace without much pain, near the same as Claire could, and that kept them together.

Intertwined fates and all that.

When stuck alone for thirty years by both consequence and your own choice, intertwining paths of any kind were as tempting as lemonade on a hot summer day in the desert.

They arrived an hour and eight minutes after sundown, meaning their trip had taken a dull thirteen hours. Any words spoken had been by him making observations about their surroundings, her occasionally acknowledging this with a peep of a sound.

Small towns never ceased to amuse him. They were in the middle of nowhere, all the residences around holding acres between neighbors, and yet there was always a half of a square mile in the dead center with closely packed buildings and street signs resembling a small city, an amusing trait to him since the activity dropped off drastically if you took five steps to the left.

He followed Claire's lead, watching her with interest as she moved in the brush around the main road, opting to emerge at the edge of the gas station a corner over.

"Remember the story?"

"Yes."

"Come on."

"Wait," Sylar said as they stood just inside the tree line. "I'll ask at the bar."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Gas station's twenty-four hours; is anyone except the locals going to stop at the rundown bar for a drink?"

Claire sent him an approving look. "Okay."

* * *

Claire fondled the cash in her pocket as she slowly paced the convenience story, nodding a hello to the leering cashier. The cover story was unnecessary for her to use as he only repeated the bill to her without much of a friendly touch. She was left with fifteen dollars. Living stationary and isolated for so long had dwindled her 'savings', not that she had ever had much to begin with.

She carried dried-out food staples in the brown paper bag, which she promptly tossed to Sylar when she crossed the road. He was standing against the outside of the bar, looking quite proud of himself. She ignored that. "So?"

"What's this?" He only asked.

"Food."

He paused but she offered up no other explanation, crossing her arms at him. He pushed the bag under his arm. "Linda," he began in a drawl, "was _more_ _than_ _happy_ to give us _lost_ and _wandering_ _naturists_ a ride into town — the name's Bellmore. Oh, and she thinks we-"

"Hi!" A foreign voice greeted, pushing out of the door besides Sylar. Claire forced herself to stay still and not automatically twist her body in a defensive stance, lest it confuse — or worse, intimidate — the other woman. "You must be Claire. Give me a sec." She proceeded to lock up the all but abandoned place with a master set of a keychain. The blonde found herself slightly impressed that the woman could get it on the first key pick.

She spread her face in a smile. "You must be Linda."

"Sure am. Come on; parked around back."

They piled into the faded green Chevy truck from sometime during the seventies. Linda and Sylar were at of the doors, Claire in the middle, as the smallest always was. They were pulling onto the state road when the stranger with mousy-brown hair lit up a cigarette, taking a long drag. Sylar appeared indifferent, but Claire struggled not to cough. Her lungs weren't without their healing long enough for a sort of rapport to have built up and the smoke made them instinctively squeeze and wish to splutter.

Exhaling a clean breath and putting both hands on the wheel to turn, Linda spoke. "That must've sucked, huh, getting snowed in on your honeymoon?" Claire shot a heated glare to her companion of these last three months. "Gotta ask, why honeymoon all the way out here? We're nothin' special with those nature hotspots and what not."

"That's why we came," Sylar volunteered. "Isn't that right, Claire-bear?"

If the past thirty-five years hadn't taught her well the art of self-control and an easy fluency regarding adopting to new personas, Claire would have started all-out beating her roommate to a bloody pulp. Not _once_ since encountering each other again had he used her dad's nickname, let alone against her. It was a shock to hear again. Coming from his taunting mouth, it pissed her off. She smiled sweetly for Linda's benefit, masking her internal turmoil. "Yeah, we wanted to see more of the, uh, hidden stuff. A lot of those other places are overrated — yes, they're beautiful, but fighting a crowd half the time kinda ruins it. Don't you agree, _Gabe_?"

Yes, in the absence of the apple-pie life, Claire Bennet had more than honed her vindictive side.

"Gabe?" Linda inquired after.

"Oh, yeah, Sylar's only his middle name. He thinks Gabriel's too plain."

The other woman nodded. "I get that; _loads_ of Mary's and Susan's in my line. I was lucky. Gabriel a family name?"

"Religious mother," he said, tight-lipped. "It didn't take."

She laughed, pulling into a parking spot on the main road of the sparse town. It was made up of a dozen or so buildings, all looking sufficiently modern, a few two-stories. "This is Bellmore, population four hundred and give or take. Most of us live rural. You guys need a ride back?"

"No, that's okay. We'll call our friends to pick us up in the morning, thanks."

They piled out onto the sidewalk, Sylar still quiet. Claire turned to her companion when Linda pulled away, only to have him grip her upper arm tightly. She made no protests except for the nonverbal communication of annoyance via eye roll as he strode behind a garbage container in an alleyway nearby. "_What the hell_?"

"I could be asking the same," she threw back.

He growled. It did nothing to make her back down, chin up challengingly. "Don't _ever_ call me Gabe or Gabriel again."

"Don't call me Claire-bear." A switch flicked and a fast smirk lit his face, one practically dripping with mockery. She beat him to the punch, cutting past his bullshit before he could say something that would make her too pissed off to see reason. "Get over yourself, Sylar! You want to distance yourself from your past as much as I do. So, we got a deal or not?"

He faced off with her for another minute, unreadable brown eyes against hard-standing green. A moment later, he walked away. She let him.

* * *

It was four years ago when she'd last been addressed by her loving nickname. It was not a happy moment, yet it was scarred within her mind nonetheless. That was usually the way it went, Claire was discovering. The happy moments were fleeting, something not to be hoped for but rather feared, because over time they would lose their luster and only the bullet-points of their memories would be kept, while every horrid second of something painful was intact in mint condition within the brain.

The name had come out as a gasp over the phone. He was working, shuffling fast with half a mind on something, and simultaneously lecturing her about staying behind the scenes when helping with Peter's operations. Once more, she tried telling him that since she could not be hurt permanently, why shouldn't she put that to the best of use?

She was stubborn and didn't tell him that she understood. She knew being killed was not the worst thing in the world for her. But she did not tell him that. Instead they parted ways with the ever-present 'I love you's and unresolved grudges.

Peter came back to Vancouver early a couple weeks later from who-knows-where in the states, somber with the news of her dad's passing. The funeral hadn't been an option for her.

"Looking for something?" The woman behind the checkout counter called over.

Claire fluttered her eyes, pushing the memories down firmly, finding that she had been fingering a blouse for the past two minutes. It was pretty but completely impractical. "Yeah; sweaters?"

"Two rows behind you."

"Thanks."

Methodically, she grabbed three sweaters, two new pairs of jeans, some camisoles and T-shirts, socks, a new jacket, and then stepped back into the changing rooms. She assumed Sylar was doing the same. Or, he'd… left. The blonde sat stiffly down on the corner bench provided in the half-curtained room.

Inwardly, she chided herself for being surprised at the thought. As if it would be so out-of-the-blue for him to leave. It was Sylar, the master at avoiding complications and using people for his own needs.

So why had he stayed around so long?

What if he'd used the convenience of her place to stay low? She wouldn't exactly know if he had upset some apple cart out in the real world. Maybe the story he told her the first time he came to her had been a fabrication; not completely, of course, because ever a paradox, the serial killer liked to pride himself on being selectively truthful. She couldn't see him lying about killing that kid — maybe it wasn't an accident, though? Or maybe he had meant to kill the mother, but as he said was unaware of the child's presence.

Her head hurt. Claire looked down at the cloth, wool, and jean knit pieces of clothing on her lap. And then she remembered — she only held fifteen bucks to her name. "Shit."

Stealing would be risky. Her mind raced with all the scenarios. Running out the front door would be the only option; there was no back door and she possessed no large purse to hide at least one of the items. If she ran out the front, they wouldn't be able to stay at the motel tonight. Thus, they would have to start trekking back immediately, with the darkness already mostly descended.

She may not die, but she could freeze. Besides, the coverage from the woods didn't start until at least two miles out of this place, Bellmore, and even in the forest the canopy was nearly non-existent, fall shedding the trees of their leaves and winter snow dropping branches left and right.

She hung her head. This was her luck: _reliably_ _bad_.

"I only need to leave for an hour for you to have a breakdown, huh?"

He stood in the middle of the doorway, pulling the privacy sheet back around so this time it was shrouding both of them. "Sylar."

"Who else?" He lifted an eyebrow at her, dropping his gaze to her lap. "Ready?"

Claire relaxed her back against the wall with an inaudible yet visible sigh. "How much do you have left?" If he had at least a twenty, she could manage to dwindle down her metaphorical cart.

"Oh… enough." With a flourish, he extracted a two inch wad of balled-up cash from his jacket pocket.

She patted herself mentally on the back for not showing her shock. "Where did you get all that?"

Sylar smirked playfully at the somewhat hesitant tone in her voice. Absently, she thought about how she definitely liked this smirk the most. No judgment, no mockery, no malice. It was actually a tad… warming. And if she had to put up with a smirk in order to avoid his stone face, then so be it. "Gold-turning ability, remember? This town's got a pawn shop."

* * *

Sylar followed her when they left the store, gaze snapping around them. This feeling of being more or less in public once more left an uncomfortable knot in his stomach. How long would it take the military to get out here if a complaint was called in? An hour? Three? Would they have even a chance of escape if they were recognized or accidentally revealed an ability, or would the local authorities try to take them down anyway?

The questions lurked under his skin with answers he wasn't willing to recognize. Claire, to her credit, adopted the sharp eyes all on her own as well and made a purposefully casual beeline to the main street's motel.

It was a small place with two floors, outside access, and six rooms, from what he could tell. As she went in to take care of this errand as well, he peaked around, looking in windows and becoming comfortable with the floor plan. The first floor held the office, a storage room, and what was probably the residence of the person behind the front counter, if he had to guess. It looked like that kind of establishment, possessing just too much of a personal touch to be that of a mere decorator.

Sylar turned around when he sensed her coming, one eyebrow lifted in surprise at the fact that he couldn't hear her footsteps. When did she become like a cat?

"None of the rooms had connecting doors, so you're stuck on your own." She tossed him his key — a literal key and not one of those plastic cards; a true testament to its age — and he fumbled for it against his chest. Claire stood there staring at him as he pressed his thumb to the metal, appraising him.

He wondered what she was thinking about; probably wondering herself what his plan was, why he was still here, why he was staring at her. He could almost hear the thoughts. They were some of his own. Instead of calling her out on it, though, he only bid her goodnight and turned his back, mounting the staircase.

* * *

The motel had a laundry room. Granted, it was more like a closet in its size and the machines were more than ten years old, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Claire stripped to her underwear and a tank-top after locking the door, sitting on the end table pressed next to the door as the entirety of her clothes spun in the washer.

The soapy suds fell repetitively in a waterfall over the glass door, thin plastic form rattling against the dryer on one side and wall on the other. The green paint wore away to reveal plaster at one of the more exposed marks. At least the sound of the machine itself was minimal.

She unfolded the thin newspaper on her lap, lone light bulb hanging on a string casting annoyingly uneven white light about. Her dad used to read the newspaper sometimes, a thought she took a deep breath from, ignoring it with stiff shoulders. She didn't think she would be one to read it ever herself — through either desire or availability — but times changed.

World news didn't start until page 3 of the ten page paper. Uninterested in the Christmas plays advertised and the story of some young kid getting first prize in a music competition a town over, she flipped through the pages without hesitation.

The usual was reported — economy progress (all but recovered from the depression that finally hit rock bottom ten years ago), foreign affairs (another proxy war in another third world country), politics (the usual musical chairs rendition in preparation of another election). It all made her frown. Everything had a circle, following the same routines, nothing changing. If it changed, it only ever changed for the worst.

That was her experience and it was experience that managed to constantly remind her with painful memories.

On page seven she found a story about a Special. A woman, twenty-three years old, captured after working with a hacking group. No one else in the group possessed abilities so they were being tried with electronic espionage and aiding and abetting a fugitive. The state of Maine was making it their good PR case for the year, the governor giving a quote about how the people of Maine were still threatened by the people the government was daring to lax up on.

Claire had spent many years helping Peter, two decades in fact, because she wouldn't let them keep trying to hide her, wouldn't let herself fall into a pattern of relaxation into the normality of others. She wanted to fight for her rights and independence, join the fight allowing them to be themselves. She knew first hand how hard the governments truly were on people like her. At this point, extinction was as much of a concern as the governments were.

_"I'm a natural progression of the species. Evolution is part of nature and nature kills. Simple, right?"_

Her hands fisted, crinkling the cheap paper that couldn't be found in big cities anymore. Anger swept through her, making her shudder. His words had been right but not in the way that he had said them for. Evolution is a part of nature but it wasn't them that were killing; he had, yes, but _they_ weren't. They were the ones _being_ killed.

She wanted to hit something, break every last dim-witted politician's skull the way she would have with Sylar if he had just been _normal _and wouldn't regenerate from it. Claire threw the printing the short distance to the other wall. It wasn't satisfying at all.

* * *

The people were not as nosy as he had first assumed. Sure they watched him avidly, like a vulture waiting on a lion pack to finish their feasting, but beyond the pleasantries they largely left him to himself.

Sylar now sat at the wooden bar top, twirling the glass of whiskey in front of him, debating whether to check up on the blonde ex-cheerleader or not. It was obvious that he was not wanted in whatever process of grief she was going through the motions of. He understood that and he wasn't upset about it.

So what, then?

Maybe he was feeling surprise. It was hard to tell these days if it wasn't straight-cut annoyance or guilt.

He frowned down at the brown liquid, picking the glass up and knocking a swallow back. The smooth burn was nice, despite the fact that he would never get a buzz off of it. Pity. As Gabriel, he had never drank. The most he had was wine and never more than two glasses. He had behaved like such an old woman.

Habits he picked up from his mother, Sylar could say now with certainty. She had been his main source of socialization. It was bound to rub off, no matter how negative it had been.

He ground the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. Not even the memory of his mother could rile him up anymore. Funny how the decimated life of a person he would hunted have in any other universe now incited more emotion out of him than his own flesh and blood. Not as though his flesh and blood were anything worth a damn. A rotten group of the mentally insane, all of them.

That, however, made him smirk. Him accusing others of being certifiable. Right. He had no place to judge, but it wasn't like the right-and-wrong on the politically correct scales would influence any of his decisions.

Screw them. Screw all of them. The law-abiding hypocrites, the spying yet somehow safety-procuring government, the ignorant preachers, the brutal loved ones.

He swallowed the rest of his glass then, biting back the cough that threatened. Claire would soldier on herself and in the meantime he would leave her be. It was what she wanted, right?

He held up his hand for another round.


	2. Chapter 2

They left the next day. This time the trip took them fourteen hours. Claire's mood was snappishly short, something he wasn't sure could be properly attributed to her paranoia or grief. He kept his distance a dozen steps behind her.

Sylar hadn't meant to do it. Truly, he had not. However, there was some relief in returning to the cabin and it had relaxed him to a startling point that he had not even realized he had used the ability until the unfamiliar name bounced around inside his head.

_Vicki Masters._

He peered at her but the mask over her face was as firm as ever. Sylar couldn't stop looking at her, though. Watching her. The name had been accompanied by feelings of grief, regret, anger, love. All of them curled into one massive complex that reminded him of his feelings towards his mother, except it was different — much different.

His relief with the cabin was a very simplistic reaction. It was familiar to Claire and upon doing a check on it and through the surrounding woods, she visibly relaxed. With her sitting on the attic stairs, book in hand, he leaned against the back window, form mostly lost in the shadows caused by her candle. He leaned his head against the wall now, watching her.

She had told him the first week, after he asked her why she pulled down the stairs and rested on them like that, that it was for flexibility. If they were ambushed, she had easy access to the attic and from there through its lone and shut-up window. It looked boarded up from the outside and she could use it to start running while no one was watching.

She had told him this with a mechanical voice. It was a system she had no doubt thought over several times. He bet she had dozens of escape routes in mind every time she walked around, sat down, opened her eyes from sleep. More than he had, probably, given that she had inhabited this place longer.

For some reason he found it hard to picture her like that — like an analytical person. Their interactions as Sylar and Claire had been minimal, granted, but as Nathan and Claire? Those had been plentiful and while like everything else Petrelli and Bennet it had been full of awkward moments and lacking in a certain closely familial feel, it had at least been _similar._ Oddly comfortable. Thinking he was Nathan, he had put as much effort into that relationship as she had and that truly was saying something considering how desperately she had wanted to connect to her biological family, even after their epic levels of dysfunction disappointed her.

Claire was an emotional person. Intelligent, persistent, quick? All yes. It was the emotion that drove everything in her being, though, no matter whatever she had been through, whatever mantra she told herself, and he was certain that she did tell herself one every night if the mask he was seeing her wear, even when she thought she was alone, was something to go by.

Staring at her now, how easily she was curled up, one foot underneath her thigh while the other was dangling off the side, he pondered on how much of it was genuine and how much of it was practiced. Did her body actually relax or did she adopt the posture of one that was, when in truth she was as taut as a bowstring? Stressed from memories, some possibly relating to the name he had accidentally uncovered?

There was no doubt. It was the latter.

"Stop it."

"What?"

"Staring. It's creepy."

He snorted. She raised her head. Sylar walked over to the side of the pull down staircase, resting his hands on either side of her knees. She almost twitched in what would no doubt be annoyance at the action but refrained from acting childishly. She closed her book and clasped her hands on top of it instead.

"What?" She was the one to ask this time.

He smirked at her at first, lazily, line of sight rested on the book in her hands. _Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There_ by Lewis Carroll. "Interesting choice."

She said nothing.

He knew the book and at the thought of its theme, lifted his head, mouth no longer curved. His fingers twitched for something he couldn't name, but maybe he didn't want to. "You knew her," he stated.

Claire's eyebrows furrowed. "Who, Alice?" She attempted to joke.

"Vicki Masters."

Her eyes flashed at the name, face turned plain once more. Always impassive, always closed off, always so incredibly _fake._ She kicks him then, right in the throat, and he stumbles back, wheezing in a deep breath, stopping himself before he clutches at his throat like every other pitiful being would.

"Don't you _ever_ use your abilities on me again."

Sylar stands there as she opens up her book and continues reading, simultaneously wanting to attack her and admire her for that, thoughts interrupted by a young face that flashes in his memory when he lets his thoughts delve for a second _too long_ into the possibility of killing her, thinking that it wouldn't matter because she would wake with a shuddering breath an hour later. He winces then.

She doesn't look up as he walks outside.

The lake is icing over at the edges, no more than a few inches but enough to warn him from touching the water. He would still feel the pain of its freezing temperature. He almost tempts it, welcomes it. Almost. With a deep breath, he sits on the edge of the dock, losing track of the hours until the sun begins to rise over the horizon.

* * *

"Woodpecker."

"Where?"

"Two o'clock."

Claire turned her head in the proper direction too late, only managing to catch a flurry of brown wings going around the trunk he had caught the bird nesting in. If she said 'nesting' he would likely frown and point out why that was wrong.

It was a week after their trip through the woods and to the neighboring town. The leaves were long past falling, winter approaching steadily, and now snow lay lightly upon the canopy of bare branches overlapping above them from a slight misting the night before. A handful of seconds later, the tell-tale pounding from a certain bird started up.

"Huh," she commented simply.

Their walk continued on in silence for the next hundred yards until Sylar's keen sight wielded something else and he pointed out a fox hole. She murmured another throwaway comment, attention lingering on it a little longer than polite as she found herself interested by his running commentary, the innocent knowledge he possessed.

The habit was peaceful to him, same as the walks were for her; she had no doubt about that. She wasn't exactly sure why but she accommodated it, joining him. Maybe she did because he did the same with her, one of the few instances where their time in a shared space _didn't_ end with at least one feeling upset. At the cliff edge he rattled off a lazy spiel about the migration patterns of eagles and how, if they stayed long enough, they might catch sight of some returning to the area. She didn't outwardly react to the staying comment, nor to the 'we' he used, but it left her feeling heavy somehow.

She hadn't been part of a 'we' in a long time. And Sylar? Well, he was _Sylar._ She deflected instead, as she did best now, by asking, when they moved back into the tree line, "How do you know all this stuff?"

He licked his lips, hesitating. Sylar had kept his distance for the past couple of days, since the kicking incident. It served him right, having this kind of wariness regarding her. He had read her mind without warning and there was no way she wanted to talk about Vicki with him. However, she was glad to find he actually responded to her instead of crawling back into his bipolar-like shell. "As Gabriel, my life was lacking socially — not _surprising,"_ he added with a fair amount of self-loathing.

Claire frowned, knowing that feeling herself. She had been a social butterfly in school, at least before discovering her ability, but it was the self-loathing that she understood. She had always wanted to do more but she had only happened once and while it had lasted for a while, she had eventually messed up, causing terrible repercussions for others beside her. Because she was the _cheerleader,_ the _catalyst_ — no one would let her be touched by anything except the guilt that had the ability to drown her whole.

He released a dry chuckle which did nothing to suppress the emotion he had accidentally let out. He only shrugged then and she straightened a little more. "So I read a lot. Most fiction's boring. After the classics, I moved on to science. It was my outlet."

"Did you have any friends?"

"None," he cut off quickly in a clipped tone.

That's the end of that. Claire felt more guilt, if that was possible, and took sudden interest in the frost-covered ground in front of them as he lengthened his strides. She told herself she was letting the serial killer go off by himself on another tantrum; it was leagues from how she truly felt, impulses denied because of their ludicrous nature. He wasn't the one deserving of pity; neither of them were.

* * *

_Smoke was everywhere._

_It suffocated him, constricting his throat, making his lungs spasm, and he felt genuine panic for the first time in a long while. He actually couldn't remember how long. The hallway materialized and instinctively, he ran. A door pushed open on his right and he gave it a wide arc, forearm in front of his mouth. He heard hacking. It sounded like someone was dying. He couldn't tell if that was him or the person grabbing the fire escape near him._

_He moved to the stairs. The place was practically deserted and he bound down them. A ghost of a form passed above him on the steps. With a simple thought, he slammed the door open to the outside and gulped in the tangy air of the city._

_The shadow passed behind him. He swept his arm back. He touched nothing but the ability was so engrained in his body, had been since a week after he acquired it, that he didn't have to. The person hit the wall next to the door and collapsed. He gripped his knees, coughing. Wild-eyed, he could find no one around in the alley. _

_His vision hazy, he approached the person. He could steal the agent's radio, keep track of the movements until he lost them a couple miles away, maybe ambush them and kill them if they turned out to be part of only a small group. He doubted that. They had known all about who he was this time._

_His breath caught. There was no armor, no padding, no helmet._

_A woman, long hair singed, face matted with blood against the wall. He flipped her without touching her. _

_A boy. Red hair, tanned looking skin. A boy with gray eyes opened, irises unmoving._

Sylar woke with a cough, sitting up from the nightmare when a hand pressed forcefully against his shoulder. He reacted instinctively, gripping the wrist of the stranger. The bones popped as he rolled over, hooking a leg behind their knee and landing on top of them, pushing them into the hard wood floor, pinning them down.

His vision adjusted in the dark and as soon as he saw the person's face, saw her, he let go of her wrist as though it had burned him, shame flooding through his veins. His stunned mind kept him from rising. "Claire?"

She blinked once, nearly unfazed from the whole thing. "Think you could get off?"

He bit his lip and then rolled over. They laid on their backs next to each other for a humiliating moment and silence descended like a fragile beast, encompassing the space. Sylar exhaled.

Claire stood then, gracefully extracting herself from the sheet that managed to entangle both of their legs. "Wait," he called, sitting up on his elbows. She turned around. "What were you doing?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "Giving you another blanket. It sounded like you were in hypothermia," she said dully.

He looked down at her feet and to the sheet. Sylar sat up, bunching it as he extricated himself from it as well. "Just a dream," he said flippantly, standing and shoving the sheet back to her.

She took a step back and turned around, unreadable look in her eyes, hands far away from taking it. "Keep it."

* * *

He didn't.

Claire discovered this when she woke at the sound of the first dawn bird's song, spotting the stained white sheet lying across her form. It was arranged almost perfectly, too, and she wanted to ask herself why she hadn't woken up when he had no doubt stood next to her, but that was an answer she would never get outside of speculating. _Speculating_ she would not do.

He was sipping on a cup of tea, looking out at the whiter-still lake that she loved, and didn't move when she approached. Claire stopped a few feet behind him. "Did you sneak into my room last night?"

The accusatory start to the day only made him glance over his shoulder. "I gave you the blanket back. I told you — I don't need it."

"I was trying to be nice," she retorted immediately, making his eye twitch.

Spinning around then, he regarded her with narrowed eyes. "I don't care about you being nice, Claire."

"Then what?" _What do you want here? Why do you stay here?_ She almost added, but didn't.

"Honesty!" He snapped and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. He wanted honesty? _Sylar_ wanted _honesty?_ Had the earth moved on its axis without her realizing it? "You've never had walls with me, that's why I came to you. But you're building them now!" Sylar shook his head. She bristled at the action, at him judging her, trying to control her. "Trust me, Claire, I know where that road ends."

She turned her back on him, intent on ignoring him for the day, maybe week. She had not yet decided, only knowing that she couldn't look at him a second longer while her throat felt so constricted, mind so confused, skin so flushed. "You don't know _anything."_

He snorted. "Keep telling yourself that."

Claire slammed the bedroom door on him for the first time.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** **Warning — this is the chapter with the suicidal incident. **

* * *

The fireplace showed no signs of being shut-up and for that Sylar was happy. He may not care about many things but he appreciated warmth and as the nights dragged on longer, the wispy tendrils of darkness stretching farther across the iced landscape, he found himself less comfortable among the shadows and the cold.

Claire hated the idea, concerned about the smoke trail. If he was being truthful then he was slightly worried about that possibility as well, but this place didn't hold the same sentimentality for him as it did for her (even if you did include the transference) and as far as he was aware, he was still running. If not from agents looking to sedate him, then from the daily cold judgments of the blonde monitoring him at this moment, the same judgments he all but _asked for_ anyway.

"See?" He asked with a triumphantly raised brow as the tinder in the fireplace caught fire suddenly from the electric shocks, flames licking around the small sticks placed above.

Sylar rocked back on his heels from where he was crouched on the ground, leaning his back against the wall. "Don't let it die out," she warned him.

He almost rolled his eyes at her but she left the room almost immediately thereafter, walking to the back hallway, and he stared after her, thinking she was going to bed, until she returned with the blanket in hand. He did roll his eyes then, arms crossed on his kneecaps. "Claire."

"Sylar." She echoed his condescending tone, stubborn as ever. "I'm giving it to you, just take it."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't need it."

"You didn't need my power," she quipped back immediately, eyebrows raised in warning.

Sylar opened his mouth to retort but closed it just as quickly with a hum. "That's not fair."

"Life's not fair."

He smirked. "Really?" He figured she would be one of the last to call upon that cliche, but in hindsight that was all but a baseless assumption. She had been the one treated as a typical damsel in distress for years, after all. That had to rub off on her at _some_ point.

She stared at him, refusing to smile even a millimeter back. It sent a shot of something painful through him, to see how she much she was wanting to remain like stone.

"No," he said again and for some reason, this time, she listened.

* * *

More accurately it should be said that he _thought_ she listened. He was starting to understand that their block-headed attitudes were remarkably similar. It was more than a little frustrating.

That night was free of haunting dreams and his sleep was bothered by nothing in _particular,_ six foot long skeleton tossing and turning on the five foot long couch as the usual creaking of the boards and chirping of the nighttime birds rested against the metaphorical wall of his subconscious, just barely audibly.

The moon was halfway in its cycle, dim lighting spread over the landscape both in and outside rather evenly. Pale illumination spilled in from the window the couch faced and he held his eyes shut resolutely to the light that appeared ten shades too bright in his perpetually half-irritated state.

He sensed her before he heard her, something that was becoming a pattern now, the soft pads of feet dancing mutely across the floorboards the way a butterfly flitted from one flower to the next. Sylar didn't dare to move his eyes, waiting to know what she would do. His kill spot came to mind, including the fact that he had told her where it was, but for whatever reason he felt no fear at the possibility.

At Claire's hand, holed away in a cabin no one else in the world cared about, was a scenario he was surprisingly resigned to. At the very least he knew she wouldn't _experiment_ on him, or take the chance of leaving him in any sort of state that could lead to him waking up.

She didn't stab him when she shifted in front of his face, blocking the moonlight. He shot his hand out to grip her wrist, recalling an impression of déjà vu, when he felt the blanket being dropped on his shoulders. "Claire." All introspection regarding his possible impending death was forgotten as he all but growled at her.

In the shadows, all he could see of her face was the setting of her jaw. "You're not comfortable and you're keeping me awake so you're going to take the sheets and shut up."

Sylar pulled and she yelped, stumbling down on him, forearm pressed haphazardly against his windpipe as he trapped her legs with his. She huffed in his face and he responded with using his other hand to rip the blanket from between them, throwing it over her shoulders instead, a juvenile sense of satisfaction arising in him at the motion. She squirmed and he used the movement against her, rolling onto his side as he deposited her on the ground.

"You're a child," she accused, standing with a pant.

"Don't even try it."

A long stretch of time passed before she turned on her heel. They both pretended to ignore when she tripped over the blanket a step later, though Sylar wasn't entirely sure why he gave her so much leeway as he laughed silently. The tentative reminder of the _respect_ he held for her was the explanation he told himself.

* * *

It became a sort of battle between them. It was an incredibly petty one, but it was a battle nonetheless.

Claire took the challenge gratefully, wanting something to do, anything to do, and if it was one involving making Sylar listen to her then she was more than happy to pursue it for as long as it took.

Four times he pulls her down and then pushes her off the couch, two times he telekinetically pins the blanket to the wall, and one time he fakes sleep and lays it on her sleeping form after the fact, something she knows because his breathing is just slightly off, too shallow, and because she fakes sleep that time as well. It took nearly five in the morning for him to think she had lapsed into an unconscious state, going to her then with it and setting it over her. The entire bout of willing sleep deprivation had been worth it just for the chance to open her eyes and glare at him in that brief moment.

Her body and mind were used to restless nights already.

She hates that he now knows how she really sleeps but she won't say that out loud and he has not said anything about it either so she lets the topic die, never to be brought up again, just like with so many other things.

He looked up then from across the small edge of lake that lies near the cabin and she mustered up another glare at him from the edge of the dock. At this point she isn't sure if she is glaring at him because it is, well, _him,_ or if she was wearing this expression for the sake of it, a projection of her pessimistic world view and overall perspective. It didn't matter.

A strange, disbelieving sort of smile rises to his face when their eyes meet and Claire looks away again, laying back on the warped and pale planks, resolutely not look at him. She finds she wants to ask him a lot of things when he looks at her like that, like he would answer all of her curiosities without complaint.

She doesn't, though, because she cannot. The space between them is different, _off,_ more friendly than it is adversarial, more _tainted_ by tones of contentment than the pressing needs of survival. The questions would no longer sound like taunts, laced with clinical curiosity, and he would give her a weird gaze for it that would be recognition of this shift from him, too. Recognition that once obtained would never be able to be discarded.

Claire thinks that maybe their minds are extreme polar opposites after all, despite how continually he professes of understanding her and how for a while she had actually believed it. The obvious fact that he is no longer a threat to her has settled far too easily in her mind. Because of that knowledge, she know that has no reason to _obsess_ as she is doing with him, with his presence, with the contradictory reminder of the days he killed without a soul and had looked at her in Odessa in that last minute with something close to humanity shining behind his eyes. Eyes of that were so clearly his now and ones she could only think about having possessed at one time.

She did not have them now, not anymore. There was too much _pain_ in her. She was sure of it.

It was a casual move, something that shouldn't be so easy, and with a slight push her heels rubbed off from their perch and her legs from the knees down hung over the side of the dock. Claire gasped at the feeling of the cold water hitting her toes, feet, shins, small waves lapping at her skin that was jarred alive from the movement. The blood that sprang under the surface was just as quickly receding.

It becomes almost _calming_ then and Claire wonders for way too long how it would feel if she slid fully into the water and let it overtake her, drown her. She was told her whole life that drowning was one of the most peaceful deaths. Is that true?

The cabin door noisily closes, too quiet to be called a slam, exactly. Claire lingers outside until the light is shining below the treeline and shudders wreck her body, hypothermia setting in permanently. She knows she's going to die and she does not care. She actually welcomes it as she pulls her numb legs up and wobbles to a stand.

Her feet are blue and tinged with a black edge that she notices as she makes her way back inside, stumbling past Sylar, pushing her bedroom door to a crack behind her. Claire settles in her spot and her eyes hood as she lets sleep wash over her, a small smile brought to her face. She was not going to let herself die permanently this time but she decided that whenever the time came, drowning would be her answer. It was _fitting._

She would feel no regret from not feeling the pain. After all, she wasn't _supposed_ to.

* * *

Sylar leaned against the hallway wall as soon as she cracked the door, stilling there for reasons he wouldn't address inside of his own mind until the stars rose in the sky outside and the inferno eating away at the logs simmered down into a drowsy popping. Sylar cocked his head moments after it happened.

No breathing.

He hadn't been able to stand watching her outside when made her intentions clear, but he pushed open the cracked door now, something close to interest or concern too great. She was in her usual place curled against the two-sided corner, knife resting on the floor beside her hip, toes teased out in the small space between the edge of her thighs and the dresser's frame. It wasn't _her,_ though. It was her corpse.

He didn't know what to do. Hypothermia was not a death he had experienced before, the majority of his 'ends' involving violent circumstances. Did she need to be warmed up? Moved? She looked peaceful. As if she was only sleeping. He could maybe even consider that notion in any other situation, except that her legs were still discolored and the rest of her body only paled the further the skin strayed from her chest.

Sylar picked up the blankets cast aside, including the one fought over, and knelt down to carefully arrange them around her one by one, tucking her in to the position she preferred for whatever reason. When he was done, he pulled the door to a near close as it had been before and moved to his couch, _waiting._

It was two hours before she coughed. Sylar had not realized how shallow his breathing had been until he was alerted to another sound within the space. Relief flooded him, a newly discovered and distinctly prodding feeling that made him squeeze his eyes shut, fingers pressed together tight where they were pressed together in a steeple form on his knees.

The logs in the fireplace flaked bit by bit, charring into ash as he slowly forced himself to relax, mind constantly reminding him of how Claire _couldn't actually die,_ a reminder he should _not_ need. Still, sleep eluded him. He did not mind, listening to the movement in the room behind him, other ear always open to the sounds of the outside, dark eyes fixed upon the beautiful destruction in front of him as he laid on his side, considering it. Wood burned, charred black, bursting apart as white ash, falling to the iron pit's floor.

Eyes hooded, he was surprisingly unaware of how much time passed between him resuming his post and her approaching. It had been too long for him to acknowledge since he had been so distracted. Somehow, he had managed to truly relax, both mind _and_ body this time. The idea should weigh more frighteningly firm in his mind than it did. As it was, he took the realization with mild surprise, same as he had before, and he opened his eyes blatantly to look at Claire. He was tired of playing this game.

She blinked at him. "Take the blanket." It was almost a plea at this point. The games and her stubbornness had been almost fun before, when such things construction an illusion of the past. The stark reality of their situation — of her constructed shell — was not satisfying in the least.

"You died," he remarked instead after a stale moment, voice hushed for no particular reason other than the fact that it seemed appropriate in the fire lit space.

Claire sighed, exasperated. "So?"

"Why?"

Instead of a mocking retort, the silence stretched out until she only admitted, "I don't understand what you're asking, Sylar."

He cocked his head, surveying her with a dozen other questions he knew she wouldn't answer if they came from his lips. "Why did you kill yourself?"

She licked her lips, eyes sparkling in defense. He had always been captivated with how expressive her eyes were but the reminder that she didn't recognize that in herself anymore made him frown. "Take the blanket."

"No," he said now with passion of his own. He had honestly expected an answer. How naïve of him.

"Take it. It's just a blanket!"

"It's yours."

"When has that ever stopped you?"

"Never — but I wish it had," he snapped, rising to a sitting position, an uncharacteristic flush rising within him. "Living forever is depressing and you, the freaking _ball of sunshine_ I stalked, daddy's little _Claire-Bear,_ are even worse off than _me."_

She slapped him then and he didn't fight it, setting his jaw back before he met her eyes again. They were wet and it made Sylar pause, tongue stilling behind his lips, waiting.

She shoved the meaningless sheet against his chest. "Shut up; I can't feel pain, remember? So I can't feel the cold." Her lips curved in a sardonic imitation of a smile. "If I freeze again I'll just wake up in the morning like _nothing's_ changed, so take the damn blanket."

"That's not funny,"he said sharply before shaking his head at her strained voice, disappointed for no easy reason he could tie down. "No."

Just as quick as she turned away did she spin back, punching him. He dodged the true impact as her knuckles acquainted themselves with his skin and grabbed her wrist, pulling her towards him. Sylar acted on auto-pilot without much thought put in the actions. Instead, his mind was focused on wanting her to sleep, to take care of herself, to still be there in the morning so he wouldn't be _alone._

The entire flailing debacle only lasted a few seconds and then her legs were intertwined in his, her lithe form laid sideways against the back of the couch, head cradled on his folded arm. She sucked in a breath as they stared at each other, her eyes wide and vibrant in the way that always made him want to smile in appreciation.

The situation wasn't planned, nor was it ideal. But, Sylar thought as he brought his other arm to rest on the bundled blanket between them, it was do-able. And he found he didn't want to move, anyway. He laid his head against his open palm without another care given to how she would react.

"What the hell, Sylar?" She asked in a small voice, eyes moving to his chest as they avoided his.

He slid his own eyes shut, wanting her to take the not-so-subtle hint. "We need to sleep. You don't sleep for long by yourself and if you die of hypothermia again…." The trail of words fell off with a grumble. "You're not dying again tonight."

Her warm hair tickled his arm.

"Biting my ear off won't make me get up," he warned, hoping that him mentioning it did not actually make her try it, did not give her the new thought. That would be… painful.

Claire snorted in derision at that, a soft sound that vibrated on his skin and through to his ribs.

He kept himself awake until he felt her fall asleep, pulse radiating from her cheek evening out, breaths becoming methodically languid as they puffed out on his neck. Her hand slipped from where she had kept it robotically on her hip and he reached for it for a reason his past self would chastise him for, something he ignored as he pulled it between them, cradling the limb delicately in his. He opened his eyes only once more after that to study the abnormal lack of scars and calluses on her skin.

She sighed, a sound with only a bare resemblance to all the rest he had had the opportunity to hear. Softer, sweeter, purer. Contented and _real._

It was a signal, as one second she was rigid and the next her shoulders sank, fingers curled around his, knees bent between his, and her head inched closer, seeking the warm solidity he presented. Sylar was the one to freeze then as she re-situated, his immortal heart hammering against his ribcage. This he had not intended, this he had not expected. This was foreign.

Her trust. _Inexplicable_ trust.

It wasn't the same as it had been with Maya Herrera — Claire Bennet wasn't so naïve after their many first encounters always showcased him at his worst. Hesitantly, he squeezed her hand, leaning his head down to rest his nose on her crown. She sighed again, that rare sound filling the space between the cabin walls. Sylar didn't care about justifying his actions anymore to the Hunger that coiled around inside him; he hadn't since he began to seek her out, anyway. He stretched his arm around her back and held her close.

He didn't mind resting here as he did for the rest of the night, a feeling akin to protectiveness guiding him. It was better than sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

Sylar isn't quite sure which book it is that he has in his hands anymore — which is slightly pathetic considering A), it's in his hands, and B), they only have _three_ — as he re-reads the same sentence at the top of the page. It is adamantly against processing through his brain. The night before continues to roll through his brain, taunting him. Claire said nothing and neither had he when they woke up and disentangled. It was strangely disconcerting.

He doesn't know what to do with this new territory. It feels as though it should be addressed _as_ something different, but she keeps going on as though everything is the same, her honed mask of neutrality perpetually in place. It's when he finally looks up, abandoning pretence of still reading the book, that the thought strikes him of what's bothering him so much.

_That mask._

He is not sure when he became such a pitiful person but pinpointing the date doesn't sound like an appealing idea. "You've lost it," he says then in a casual tone to distract himself, to voice one of the thoughts that has a chance of setting her off, of forcing that fire to rise again. The tone does not warn her at all for what he's talking about.

"Lost what?" She inquires back flatly.

"Your hero-complex."

Claire's eyes narrow but she doesn't object to its previous existence and it makes him certain that she is as wary as he is.

"You didn't like it last night, when I said I'd keep you alive."

"Yeah, well…. The best person to trust is yourself," she states vaguely.

He stayed quiet for a long minute. _He_ trusted _her_ with his kill spot. "Admit it," he prods, voice laced with his old taunting air. "You like having someone to lean on, but you're afraid to now because last time you lost Peter."

"I didn't lose Peter." Claire folded her arms, standing and abandoning what she was doing. "He was the one with the hero-complex, not me; he wanted to save me all the time, even when I didn't want to be saved."

Sylar wasn't blind; he knew something near catastrophic must have happened to leave her on her own. Peter Petrelli was not getting any younger, sure, but the last he knew — which was admittedly information from a couple of years ago — the hero was still alive and well and kicking back just as much as ever. Sylar raised an eyebrow at the latest pseudo-revelation in her words.

She sat back down on her shins, dismissing him when he stayed silent and he misses seeing her fiery eyes still on him. One more push and she would be over the edge and back in the category of hating him, mostly ignoring him. One more push and he would see hurt flicker across her face, a _clear_ emotion. He holds back because somewhere along the line the desire shifted and he'd rather see her as she truly is and not mold her further into this shell she doesn't even realize she's breaking out of.

Selfish as it is, _she_ is the touchstone he can't help but have and _she_ is the only one he wants to see when he looks at her face.

He watches her cold façade as it crumbles bit by agonizing bit each day and he wants to tell her how envious he is, how much he wishes his own soul was so vibrantly resilient. He feels dead inside, had for a long time now, yet here she was, pretending so desperately to be the same when the very cells of her being wouldn't let it happen.

He almost tells her so but then she turns that green gaze his way, the one of peaceful disbelief when her eyes land on his, and the words feel wrong to say, so he keeps them at the back of his throat and turns the next page instead.

She doesn't ask why his stare lingered and he would be lying if he said he wasn't grateful.

* * *

_"It's been a long time since someone's called me that."_

Sylar glanced over from where he was leisurely pacing along the tree line that nestled along the lake. He caught her stare. A tiny, somewhat confused smirk quirked up his lips before he spotted how she was playing with the water again. Claire studiously refocused on the ripples she was causing with her toes.

Things were different, and yet there were times — like now — that she caught herself acting as before. Sitting without care, without thinking, without _any_ calculation or sort of reasoning behind the action at all. Her thoughts kept her from pure boredom; thinking of _Sylar_, puzzling over his behavior, past, presence, and thoughts kept her from pure boredom.

Claire wasn't always thinking about him when she stared at him, though, as weird as that sounded. His presence — both because it was Sylar, a person from her past, and simply a person at _all_ — left her suddenly absorbed in thoughts about her own past, the world, her potential future, her dreams (those all past too — she could not let herself dream anymore, as it only always brought disappointment and false hope), and other Specials, like Peter.

Before, she hardly thought about anything at all. Rather, she went through the motions. Survival first and foremost and _only._

Watching as her feet were going from pale-cold to an unhealthy blue, she reluctantly removed them from the dangerously chilly lake. No, she didn't want to go through hypothermia again right now. They would have to leave soon. The snow was falling bit by bit daily now, leaves long since part of the dirt, ice resolutely claiming the lake's edges. Somewhere along the way, she started thinking of Sylar and her as part of a group instead of just 'Claire and then Sylar' and that was what tugged at her focus more than anything else.

It was a bit _sad,_ all things considered.

Where her peripheral vision failed her, the scraping of his boots' rubber soles on the worn dock boards told her Sylar was approaching. He sat next to her without a word. "I got caught once," Claire confesses to the quiet landscape — to _him_ — before thinking it through. She hadn't ever said it aloud before and now it feels like a physical sort of weight is off her shoulders, settling down in her heart instead.

"Vicki Masters?"

His voice is hushed too and she wants to say that it's _wrong,_ that he should be mocking her for her inferiority of _feeling._ "Yeah." She cleared her throat, staring at the water as she talked. It was... therapeutic. "It was a week after we knew they were coming. Peter got most of us out. But I…. I went back. She was just a kid at the time and she, uh, tripped up, at a bus station; minutes after I'd said goodbye.

"So I tried to find her, returned to Montreal. They caught me four days after — more than I expected." She snorted, finding a cynical sort of humor in it. At the time, her nerves had been wrecked as she had waited for them to strike and get it over with. "I thought up this whole plan — infiltrate, find her, break us and as many others out." Claire cleared her throat when her eyes started to sting but the flush crept up on her face without regard to her wishes. She pressed her lips together tight.

Thinking about the thirteen year old with intelligence way beyond her age always got the cheerleader emotional. The girl was a whiz with strategy through pure training and loved computer games. Yet she a romantic at heart too, and a complete obsesser of seventeenth century set fiction. All she could do was luminescence — illuminate her whole body like a living light bulb. What harm was that to _anybody?_ The girl didn't deserve living in a barred facility, drugged for the rest of her practically non-existent life.

"But," Sylar prompted when she'd gone silent, everything from his shoulder to hip to thigh pressed against hers, eyes like lasers on her form.

She noticed with some relief that his hand was on her forearm, too. This time, she felt warm. "But Peter swooped in during a transport — intersected the van, got me out. I woke up a couple hours later. He was upset… made me promise not to choose to be caught again, reminded me that I wouldn't get the relief of _dying..._ I agreed….

"And that was the last day we saw each other." Claire lifted her line of sight, looking to him. Their gazes locked quickly, inevitably. "So no, I don't have a _hero-complex,_ Sylar. Heroes are hunted and used for propaganda bullshit." A small smirk twisted her lips. "Guess I should've guessed that with Batman and Superman hiding their identities, huh?"

The smirk on Sylar's face was different again, lacking of taunt and full of understanding. Like they were sharing part in a secretive joke. Which, she supposed, they were.

They sat there until the sun disappeared behind another line of formless clouds that promised snow. Nonchalantly, she cleared her throat, turning the spotlight on him in this question-and-answer hour. "I've been calling you Sylar all this time. But you weren't using that, right?"

"Too unique." His delivery was complete with an impassive face. He was putting up the stone wall again for the first time since his stay and the fact that she could recognize that it had been lowered left her with the urge to pull away, an urge she squelched.

"But you weren't using Gabriel either?"

"Why are you asking?"

"Curious."

Sylar looked about to roll his eyes before his features relaxed almost abruptly. "You didn't go by Claire the whole time," he said matter-of-factly. He'd told her, that first day, that she was a hard person to find. A part of her was interested in just how many identities of hers he had had to sort through in order to hunt her down.

"Yeah, but you never went back to it — once?" She persisted.

He shook his head. "I always hated my birth name. It's… not self-made."

_Self-made._ Claire let out a shallow breath, understanding that she didn't want already prickling in her mind. "That's why you killed people and took their powers. You wanted the fame."

"Fame? No." He barked a bitter laugh. "Fame is for celebrities…. But _legend…."_ He ran a hand along the back of his neck, regarding her the way he did when he thought she wasn't noticing. _Calculating._ A shift in his mind, where she couldn't see, and suddenly he was open to her, soul to bear — well, as much a soul as someone like him could have left. "All I ever wanted was to be… recognized. As someone important, someone worth talking to. I didn't mean to kill anyone — not at first."

The words made her uncomfortable, to see the man behind the construction, despite how much the legend part rang true to her. "Everyone feels that way about attention…."

He smiled. Normally, naturally, for anyone but him. It wasn't small or a smirk or a crazed grin. If it was anything, it was sad. Claire mirrored it. "Ya'know, I think you're one of the few that would actually understand." The words almost indicated that he expected her to not have yet, a clarification that never came as he said nothing more, staring at her but not _seeing_ her. Lost in thought.

Claire covered his hand with hers, letting herself open up as she asked him to do the same. "Tell me."

* * *

They talked for hours. The veil by the name of _The Boogeyman_ was pulled apart, trampled on, and burned, revealing the purely human Gabriel Gray behind, from which through frustration and Hunger bore Sylar, a sort of bad-natured medium. She would never be able to look at him the same again. His evil façade was ruined for her.

On the other spectrum, she supposed her innocent cheerleader façade was ruined for him, too. _Finally._

Whereas he was clearly embarrassed by divulging all his deepest, purest secrets that were Gabriel, she felt strangely cleansed by doing the same with her own dark truths. The accidents she inadvertently caused in the public when she first began fighting back from her place in hiding; the agents she killed; the innocents she hurt, knowingly or not; the innocents she'd used, which she supposed should be included in the 'hurt' column, considering it was only a matter of time before their action of helping a Special had been found out.

She had more regrets of non-actions, though, than those she had of things _done._ Like with Vicki.

The sun set hours before, time lost to their senses as they droned on and on to each other. With the bias and judgment stripped away, in this small cabin snuggled inside unnamed woods, it was just two people with a complicated past really and truly seeing each other for the first time. It was less unnerving than either expected it to be.

* * *

At some point, she must have fallen asleep. Coming to groggily with stifling warmth surrounding her, Claire had enough functioning brain cells to decipher that her slip into unconsciousness was likely due to her body being in an environment unable to sustain a healthy body temperature. It was very rare that she could truly drift off while relaxed.

Her eyes snapped open as the night before rushed back to her. Questions raced in her mind, quickly, dozens within the span of only a couple of a seconds, when they suddenly stuttered to a stop, falling off the metaphorical cliff into the blank abyss, her mind just as quickly devoid of anything besides processing what was presented in front of her.

_Dark gray_. But it wasn't really dark, Claire remembered thinking a while ago. It was more of a gray-green, something sort of reminiscent of a gray version of sea foam. It was a ridiculous series of thoughts to have but she had been bored and he had been standing there, drinking tea like they did every morning like clockwork before going on their walk, and she may have let her eyes linger a few moments too long and her thoughts to wander a little to far the first time she had noticed it. Not like Sylar recognized any of that on her face by the time he his line of sight shifted.

_Sylar_. And just like that, all the pieces fell into place, explaining to her why and where she was.

At some point she had fallen asleep and he must have picked her up then because now she was laying on the creaky bed she never used and with arms wrapped around her. Sylar's arms. Her head tucked under his chin accounted for the weight on to the top of her head, as well as the slight ghosting of hot air she felt fawn across her hair in predictable intervals. It also explained why she was having trouble waking up — the steady rise and fall of his chest was lulling her into a state of ease.

It was deceptively snug.

Claire didn't move, though. It was dangerous — _this,_ right now. Sylar, asleep to the world; Claire, wrapped securely in his embrace; both of them, located at the front of the cabin with not even one of their four eyes keeping lookout. It was the most dangerous situation she had let herself be in for the first time in years. She should get up. She _knew_ she should. He wasn't keeping her in place this time and this degree of comfort reeked of trust and future mistakes.

She pressed her lips together to keep a huff at bay as Sylar's arms tightened from some unknown prompting, pulling her closer, somehow maintaining their place at her mid-back all the while. A surprising gentlemen, even in his sleep. Her eyes fluttered shut willingly and she fisted the material of his shirt with a sigh, snaking an arm around his back. There was no way she could pretend none of this mattered when he woke up, but the fear conjured from their closeness had drifted away sometime during the night before.

She chose to stay too.


End file.
